Bioshock creates a unique immersive experience. The way it constructs a
story, the way it allows players to customize their avatar, the way it creates
a fictionally coherent space: all these things make Bioshock more than a mere genre exercise. It's
interesting to examine how Bioshock does
all these things, yet few can probably explain why
it does them. Understanding Bioshock's
design influences is the key to a more meaningful analysis.

The first hint of Bioshock's legacy is right in the title.
According to Bioshock's creators at
Irrational Games[1], Bioshock is the spiritual successor to System Shock 2. Yet System Shock 2 did not originate all the
conventions Bioshock employs. Nor did the
original System Shock. To truly
understand where Bioshock comes from one
has to go all the way back to System Shock's
predecessor, Ultima Underworld, released
by Looking Glass Studios[2]. Though
Looking Glass made games using the first person perspective during the same
time period as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake
and Half-Life it never made games that
could accurately be called first-person shooters. Looking Glass had its own
trajectory of first-person game design independent from first-person shooters.
Their games experimented with story, character, and immersion in ways
first-person shooters did not. Bioshock
would not be the game it is without Looking Glass's innovations.

Lost Utopia

Bioshock's entire premise centers on the concept of Rapture, the lost
underwater city founded by mad industrialist Andrew Ryan. Rapture's location,
ideology, and history form the foundation upon which Bioshock builds all its logic. It explains why
the city corridors are deserted (civil war), why they are filled with
genetically altered maniacs (unregulated capitalism), and why players cannot
escape by simply walking outside (underwater city.) The concept of a utopia
gone wrong is a framing device, a way to make the player's solitary journey
through a treacherous world coherent. One can trace Bioshock's use of this device back to Ultima Underworld and System Shock.

Ultima
Underworld was an off-shoot of the popular
fantasy role-playing franchise Ultima by
Origin Systems. It offered players the experience of exploring a mysterious
dungeon, The Stygian Abyss, with nothing but their wits, tools, and magic to
save them. But Underworld was no mere
hack n' slash dungeon crawl. The Stygian Abyss was not a pit of mindless
monsters but a lost colony of moral idealists whose civilization had fallen
apart. System Shock was a
cyberpunk-themed variation on Ultima Underworld
made with the same engine. Instead of being trapped in a ruined dungeon the
player was trapped in a ruined space station called Citadel. The player was
pitted against SHODAN, Citadel's onboard A.I., which had gone rogue and
overthrown her human masters in a bloody fit of genocide. In both cases, as in Bioshock, the concept of an existing social
order coming undone, often because of the hubris of its founders, became
central to the logic of the story, the world, and the gameplay.

Physical Augmentation

Bioshock offers players the ability to enhance their avatar through
plasmids, the genetic consumer products available throughout Rapture. Players
can gain a number of abilities via plasmids, ranging from pyrokinesis to
invisibility. The player can upgrade these abilities at upgrade stations,
making them more powerful or longer lasting. Bioshock's
upgrade system is finely incremental, offering frequent yet small boosts in
ability. Though they involve no on-screen numbers, Bioshock's plasmid upgrades strongly resemble
an RPG stat system. This can be most directly traced back to Bioshock's immediate predecessor, System Shock 2, though it really goes back to Ultima Underworld.

Ultima
Underworld borrowed the traditional RPG
character enhancement system from Origin's Ultima
games. On-screen numbers governed attributes like speed, strength, and fencing
ability. Increasing these numbers increased abilities. System Shock did away with numerical stats,
arguably for the sake of maximizing immersion (Starr, 1994). Instead it
featured computer hardware upgrades which the player's avatar, a hacker, could
"install" via cybernetics. Ability gain was not incremental but
instant. System Shock 2, however,
returned to a traditional numerical system like Ultima
Underworld's. System Shock 2 was a
joint project between Looking Glass and the newly created Irrational Games.
Irrational had a slightly different design philosophy than Looking Glass, which
fostered a return to abstract RPG conventions. Irrational extended this trend
into Bioshock, which kept an incremental
upgrade system but disguised it to greater immersive effect.[3]

NPC Interaction

Bioshock features no conversation system. Rapture's citizens are mindless
horrors who attack on sight, and those who are not mindless are dead. While
this does not make Bioshock much of a social
experience, it does create a sense of immediacy. All the player's interactions
are physical, primal acts of survival. They are therefore believable. There is
no clunky dialog system to navigate, no sense that your avatar said something
that wasn't quite what you intended. There is also no chance of friendly A.I.
misunderstanding a request or failing to be helpful at exactly the wrong
moment. A world full of madness and death is one in which all people behave as
expected: violently or not at all.

This is the most significant area in which Bioshock borrows from Looking Glass. It
represents a line of thought spanning several of Looking Glass's first-person
games, beginning with System Shock. System Shock was not just a spiritual successor
to Ultima Underworld. It was a
purpose-driven revision of Underworld's experimental
design. Released in 1992, Underworld was
the first game to use smooth-scrolling, textured graphics complete with
lighting effects and physics. It thus revolutionized the first-person 3D game
with new levels of immersion. However, one area it did not innovate in was
non-player character interaction. Underworld's
NPC interaction paradigm came directly from mainstream RPG's. It involved
choosing pre-written responses from a list. This "canned dialog"
approach was an abstract convention that sat uneasily in contrast to Underworld's innovative sense of immediacy.
Frustrated with the limitations of traditional conversation mechanics, System Shock's design team chose to forgo NPC's
altogether (Spector, 1999). This is why everyone on Citadel Station is either
dead or turned into blood-crazed cyborgs. This solution worked so well
Irrational adopted it verbatim in System Shock 2
and again in Bioshock.

Audio Drama

Bioshock features a collective diegetic narrator. Rapture is not only
littered with dead people, but dead people who were kind enough to record their
own demise. The player constantly encounters small devices which contain audio
recordings illuminating how and why Rapture degenerated into chaos. These
recordings feature a colorful cast of characters and can be listened to during
play, making Bioshock into somewhat of a
macabre radio drama. Along with the everyday citizens of Rapture, the player is
taunted by Andrew Ryan... who isn't dead, but remains unseen and out of reach. Bioshock tells a complex human story by making
dialog strictly mediated, ensuring nothing distracts from the immediacy of the
experience. This convention is lifted directly from System Shock.

Released in 1994, System Shock was a very early CD game. This may
explain why its use of sound was so experimental. Most early CD games subjected
players to endless scenes of spoken dialog, but System
Shock let players move around while they listened to other characters
speak. This worked only because everyone on Citadel was dead and had dropped
their personal audio recorders. Playing detective by piecing together the story
of Citadel's downfall via these recordings was one of the prime pleasures of System Shock (Starr, 1994). And then there was
the overpowering presence of SHODAN, her voice taunting the player at every
turn. SHODAN was such a huge part of System
Shock Irrational concocted an elaborate explanation for her return in System Shock 2, a game which also featured
haunted corridors rife with audio recordings. The developers at Irrational
clearly felt this audio-based storytelling scheme was a defining element of System Shock and a feature that no proper successor,
spiritual or otherwise, should be without.

Future Shock

Bioshock is not an isolated artifact but the latest of a particular strain of
first-person game design. It exists as part of an ongoing dialog with other
games of similar design[4]
stretching back to the first days of Looking Glass Studios. However, Bioshock should not be mistaken for a direct
extension of Looking Glass's design philosophy. It is a variation, a mutation,
of what began with Ultima Underworld.
Looking Glass eventually evolved beyond the dead world concept with Thief: The Dark Project, one of the first
stealth games. Thief still avoided NPC
interaction, though in a different way than System
Shock had. Players were forced to lurk, listen, and sneak rather than
engage with people directly. Instead of a living being in System Shock's world of ghosts, Thief players were ghosts haunting a world
filled with life.

Critics and audiences have hailed Bioshock as an innovative game, yet it's
interesting how Bioshock religiously
follows a narrative formula Looking Glass continued to revise. Bioshock's achievement consists of
incorporating this effective formula into a game that is instantly recognized
as a first-person shooter, something none of Looking Glass's games were. Bioshock thus contains within its DNA an
extremely important era of videogame history, ensuring its lessons will
continue and (hopefully) evolve in the age of first-person shooter
blockbusters.

References

Notes

[1] Irrational Games was renamed to 2K Boston immediately before Bioshock's release. For the purposes of
this piece, I refer to the makers of Bioshock as Irrational Games.

[2] Looking Glass Studios was actually called Blue Sky Productions
at the time it released Ultima Underworld. The name was changed after a
merger with Lerner Research in 1992. For the purposes of this piece, I refer to
the makers of Ultima Underworld as Looking Glass Studios.

[3] One could argue that System Shock's upgrade system is not
radically different from Bioshock's since they both forgo numerical stats in
favor of "implants." However, I think a close look at Bioshock will reveal a
much higher level of incremental creep in its character enhancement system.
System Shock's implants functioned like tools with discrete uses, whereas Bioshock's
implants usually offer small improvements to existing abilities.

[4] Many games that are part of this dialogue are not discussed in
this piece. Deus Ex by Ion Storm and Arx Fatalis by Arcane
Studios are a few prime examples.